What Are Nutraceuticals and Why Are the Drug Companies Upset?

If you break the word apart, Nutra has to do with nutrition, and Ceuticals has to do with drug companies - pharmaceuticals. So what is the big deal? Nutraceuticals are god-given nutrients that are readily available for our good health, but drug companies want to make them illegal to buy and use - unless they can sell them to increase their bank accounts.

Another word you need to know is CODEX (the European Food Supplements Directive). The purpose of Codex is similar to Nutraceuticals. The government wants to control supplements so that we are made totally dependent on doctors, drug companies and the government.

Your first response is "What the heck does Europe have to do with me? I live in the US." Well, this is one of the first steps in controlling healthy things - supplements, vitamins, minerals, and healthy foods. If it is successful in Europe, they (multinational governments) will bring CODEX to the US.

So, what will CODEX do to us?

It makes people think that nutritional supplements are unsafe while it diverts attention away from the toxic side effects of prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs.

It will create higher prices for healthy supplements to force people to rely on expensive drugs covered by insurance companies.

With a decrease of stores selling supplements, the better it is for medicine (drug companies and doctors). With less sources for healthy alternatives, there is less competition with prescription drugs.

It starts legal control of not only healthy supplements but also control of nutritious foods that help prevent disease - grass-fed chemical-free beef, chemical-free chicken, and non-chemical healthful plants like broccoli.

There will be arrests of advocates of natural health - supplement makers, and retailers. These people will no longer have a voice.

It will stop the production of new supplements by making manufacturers go through hoops and/or millions of dollars for approvals of God-given nutrients.

It will set a precedence for making nutrients illegal. And then each year a few nutrients will be taken off the market. It has happened to L-tryptophan and ephedera. There was a problem with L-tryptophan. There were two versions - one naturally made here in the US and a genetically engineered version from Japan. The Japanese version caused a serious blood disease where a few died and many got very sick. The chemical boys (also known as drug companies) saw a way to get rid of competition. They also did not want the public to know that anything was wrong with genetic engineering of foods and drugs. With this in mind, they got the FDA to ban all L-tryptophan. For the most part, no one knows if ephedera has done any harm or if it's so called bad effects was because of some combination that was not investigated - on purpose. Remember well, Viagra killed more people in the first year it was on the market than all the supplements in the last one hundred years.

Outlawing nutrients that prevent disease will continue to create people who are diseased and with poor nutrition. Without supplements, they will have to turn to expensive toxic drugs - they will not get well, but it will be perceived that something is being done.

Also: If the Maker didn't make it, we shouldn't eat it - prepared foods, toxic drugs (make no mistake we need some drugs but not the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, drugs for cholesterol and pain pills).

We need more doctors who know how to find the cause of disease and help us eliminate the causes instead of covering up the symptoms with drugs - like pain pills for arthritis.

Now you know what Nutraceuticals and CODEX represent. Someday you will need to contact your congressman, congresswoman or your senator to stop the chemical boys from killing us. The only thing we have is our voices. The chemicals boys have more money to pay for political campaigns than we can imagine. Remember, Democrat or Republican is not the issue because both sides have been bought and paid for with the millions of dollars of profits made from selling us expensive drugs that don't work or make us more ill.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Robert Bard OD is a licensed optometrist and has been for many years. For the past 20 years, he has been researching the effects of toxic chemicals on the environment, animals and people. He has become an avid reporter and speaker covering topics on toxic chemicals as they relate to food, disease, medicine, water and land. Along with his wife Judy, he raises miniature Hereford and Lowline cattle, as well as goats that are grass fed without drugs or chemicals. He also restores hay meadows and pastures with organic fertilizers. For more information, visit Dr. Bob's site at http://www.drbobthehealthbuilder.com and sign up for his free weekly newsletter.

MORE RESOURCES:

Warning: fopen(http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-22,GGLG:en&q=Supplements&output=rss) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 503 Service Unavailable
in /home/boxing/public_html/supplements/inc/rss.inc on line 81
could not open XML input